Re-thinking the website sign-up

There are a bunch of websites where you have to sign up as a user, a proces which normally requires that you hand over an email address which the site will validate by sending you an email with some sort of secret token (a URL) that you need to actually activate the account. As it happens, I’m implementing such a feature at the moment. Assuming that these sites aren’t actually harvesting the addresses for purposes of on-selling them or spamming them directly, it’s usually because they need a way to do things like:

• prevent a single person from creating an unlimited number of accounts
• prevent all but the most clever bots from creating accounts
• permanently ban troublesome users

All of these are perfectly valid concerns. Most sites that I am aware of require you to provide an email address when you create your account, at which time you also choose your username and password (and provide whatever other details are deemed necessary). However, there are problems with this approach, and I think there’s a better way to do it.

Ruby on Rails “count” method

Check this out:

Ruby on Rails “count” method documentation

Can anyone, anywhere, tell me why “: order” would be needed if I am counting something? (Please note, space inserted so that wordpress doesn’t convert it into a smiley).

There are so many other holes and discrepancies in the Rails docs that I won’t try and list them, but this one takes the cake so far.